My Life in Paragraphs

I’ve never been a big fan of twitter because it’s such an ADHD kind of social media. I never make it through more than a handful of tweets before I’ve followed some link to find out how to make Cranberry Glazed Meatballs and then been sidetracked by a crazy recipe on the sidebar about a cauliflower-cheese sauce that totally fools kids. By the time I get back to twitter there are “46 new tweets”! Now I’m days behind, so I slog through a few more, end up down the rabbit hole of Astros Horrible Howlers (your whole family will love these jokes!). By the time I get back to twitter there’s a message at the top that says, “While you were away…” followed by a fresh new batch of tweets. There is NO WAY anyone can keep up with twitter unless it’s her fulltime job. And even then it would be tough. So I mostly avoid twitter because it’s impossible for me to even begin to stay on top of it. And more than that, it’s discouraging. I follow other writers who have thousands of followers and who follow nearly as many. How is that even possible? I can’t keep up with the 177 people I follow on twitter. How could I possibly follow 10K? That seems kind of insane and borders on the following for the sake of following. Mostly, it makes me wonder if anybody is even reading all those tweets. In which case, the vast majority of tweets are being sent out into the twittersphere never to be heard from again. All of this begs the question, if a person tweets and no one reads it, was it worth the agony of perfecting those 140 characters? I think not.Assuming a writer wanted to create a large horde following her on twitter, just how does one get 10K followers, anyway? I googled, “How to get 10,000 followers on twitter.” There were lots of hits on those exact words. I guess everybody wants 10,000 followers. I read three articles and by the end I came to the conclusion that Twitter is one big giant shell game. Everybody is out there scamming to get more followers. The trick is to get someone to follow someone and get them to follow you back and then use a service like manageflitter to unfollow these very same people, plus anyone who doesn’t already follow you back and anyone who hasn’t tweeted in the last three months. The goal being to have more people following you than you follow. Just like high school. You want to be popular but not look like you work at it. After wasting an ENTIRE MORNING on figuring out how to get 10K followers, I was exhausted and annoyed. I could have been WRITING. Already, Twitter was wasting my time. So I’ve decided that I’ll be content with my 185 followers. These are quality people. I promise not to stack their twitter feeds with redundant links to stuff they’ve already seen ten tweets about. I’ll only write quality blather, complete with pictures (something I learned from the How to Get articles), and occasional self-promotional nonsense. Occasionally, very occasionally, so you’ll know they’re good ones, I’ll post a link. I’m going for quality over quantity on my twitter. Yes, I realize this goes against everything that twitter stands for. I’m a rebel like that.